Dig, The Odeon Site, review

Artangel’s latest large-scale commission is being staged on the site of a long demolished Odeon cinema at the top of the Tottenham Court Road. From street level there is nothing to see, but if you cross the desolate former parking lot a sign will direct you to wooden ramp. This will lead you below ground to a sort of open-air shed filled with a hundred or more plaster casts of what look like ancient statues or fragments of statues. Welcome to the young British-Israeli artist Daniel Silver’s ambitious installation, Dig.

A few statues are caked with dirt and arranged on a trestle table, just as they would be at the site of a real archaeological dig. Scattered over other tables, more plaster shards and fragments look like they are in the process of being cleaned, catalogued and restored by museum conservators.

Elsewhere, dozens of plaster casts lie on the floor or are stacked against the wall. Some (but not all) are mounted on brand-new plaster plinths as if being made ready for display or sale.

So the first thing to realise about Silver’s installation is that its structure is sequential. It is about the archaeological process of discovery and transformation whereby objects of great antiquity are dug up from the ground, restored, displayed, and then replicated in great numbers for sale in museum shops or at the entrance to famous sites like Pompeii or Paestum.

We are not, however, looking at casts of actual antiquities. Each statue or fragment is an original work of art modelled in clay by Silver and then cast in plaster. So the “dig” of the show’s title refers not only to the excavation of artefacts buried in the ground, but to the gods and monsters that haunt the artist’s imagination. And what he uncovers there is at once frightening, funny, and inexplicable: a galaxy of humanoid mutants vaguely reminiscent of creatures worshiped Egyptians, Romans, Assyrians and Hindus – including the multi-breasted goddess Isis, the Sphinx, and the Indian god with the elephant’s head, Ganesh. Except that these aren’t literal representations of those deities but modern expressionist sculptures modelled in an extemporaneous, free-handed style that owes something to Auguste Rodin, Jacob Epsteinor Henri Gaudier- Brzeska.

Confused? I certainly was. But that’s because this is only first part of the installation. What we haven’t seen so far is the actual excavation from which these monstrosities were unearthed. To find that, we must descend via another ramp deeper underground into the penumbra of a low-ceilinged chamber that you could easily imagine as the tomb of a Chinese Emperor.

Once your eyes have adjusted to the gloom, you come face to face not with a terracotta army but the principal deities of this strange civilisation. Monumental in scale and standing upright in a dirt floor flooded at with water, these oversize male heads look as though they are carved of stone and ravaged by time. Here, at last, is what eluded us in the cold light of day upstairs – contact with the past and its mystery. That lasts only until you look a little closer at the gods worshiped by these people and recognise among them the face of Sigmund Freud.

Now comes the Ah ha! moment. In a pocket of light at the far end of the space there is surrealistic dreamscape – a three-dimensional tableau in which a bust of Freud hand-carved in onyx stands beside a modern version of his famous couch. By implication, the great man is listening to a patient, who turns out to be a life-size version of one of the Egyptian statues we saw upstairs.

Only at then do you understand that you’ve come to the end of a journey you didn’t realise you were making. Following Freud, Silver presents the process of archaeological excavation as a metaphor for the unconscious.

Both the archaeologist and the analyst piece together long-buried evidence of human experience in order to bring the past to light and by doing so to understand what we might otherwise fear. Silver’s complex installation is presented as a succession of contrasts: between present and past, light and dark, conscious and unconscious, reality and dream. He acknowledges that these gods and goddesses, heroes and demons are his, not ours. As well as stacking the statues he makes up like commodities ready for distribution and sale, in places he arranges them (just as Freud did on his desk and in cabinets that you can still see in the Freud Museum) in ways that have meaning for him but not necessarily for us. The whole thing is a tour de force – but boy did I feel the need for some sort of guidance to help me negotiate my way through it all, even if it was only in the form of a label or a catalogue.